2448600 faces Working time - about a month Very slight post in Photoshop Rendered with Mental Ray as it renders textures and lights more accurately. I'd have liked to have used GI and Final Gather, but when I tried MR freaked out and committed suicide. It's been doing that a lot to me lately. This one had a lot of challenges for me. This is the first semi-character I've ever modeled. I wanted to make the scarecrow almosr religiously iconic. And I needed it to be spooky, rather than outright scary. Getting the lights right was a challenge as well. The main figure I wanted Rembrandt 3/4 lighting, but I also wanted a red rimlight for the lightning. And yes, having studied lightning for years, the color of light it casts can range from white to pink to red, sometimes purple. But with a red and an alice blue light I didn't want purple. Plus, I had to work a lot on the textures I used because colored lights change the colors of the textures. Kind of a challenge to get the blood drips on the face to turn up as anything resembling red too. The intensity of the lights also took some work. The main light is rather low, while the rimlight is quite high. The little voodoo doll was a nod to Escher, who often placed smaller images of his main theme in his drawings. Creating the world for him to belong in was a task as well, not to mention poly heavy. I would have liked some corn plants, but I have no money to buy any and the only thing I've ever managed to make in Xfrog is a bent stick. A lot of it was a process of rendering, making notes, refining the textures, rendering, pulling a few polys here and a few polys there, rendering, adjusting, refining textures again, etc. Another challenge was to create the impression of wind, but without going overboard on it. Part of that was using the negative space to strengthen the impression that everything is blowing to the upper left, and then placing the scene objects to again strengthen that impression. I wanted it to have a sense of motion, which is kind of hard to do in a still image.